There are a lot of reasons why the U.S. government doesn’t join China and Korea in condemning Japanese officials’ visits to Yasukuni Shrine, Japanese war atrocities, and the general whitewashing of Japanese war history that has been pushed by some Japanese conservatives, but the latest declassified documents from the CIA sums a lot of it [...]

Japan’s new prime minister, Abe Shinzo, is living up to his reputation, advocating revision of Japan’s Constitution to eliminate Article 9 (the no-war clause) and the fostering of “patriotic education” that will instill a sense of pride in Japan’s youth. That’s just great. Let’s combine rearmament with the kind of nationalistic education that was used [...]

You know you’ve made it as an (academic) author when your work is cited in a Yahoo Discussion Group dealing with Japan-related role-playing games (RPG):

I actually find this citation to be the most gratifying of them all.

Japanese television has always had, IMHO, the best commercials. This web site has collected some very good ones from YouTube. I especially like numbers 18 (samurai cockroach), 10 (great concept well executed), 9 (too cute for words), 6 (too close to home), 5 and 1 (for their take on a stereotype of Japanese), and 2 [...]

Japanese robotic researchers are just plain cool … and crazy. It takes a bit of wild-eyed thinking to come up with anything interesting and cutting edge and Japanese technuts are real good at that. They often come up with stupidly wacky things, but out of all that wackiness breakthroughs arise. Now, I don’t know if [...]

Every August 15th, eyes in Asia are cast upon the Prime Minister of Japan, waiting to see if he is going to visit Yasukuni Shrine. It’s always officially an “unofficial visit,” done by the PM as a “private individual.” Of course, there is no such thing as Prime Minister Koizumi the private individual; his very [...]

I usually post an August 6th Hiroshima A-Bomb entry, but this year I opt for an August 9th Nagasaki A-Bomb entry. My staunch, morally-informed position against the Hiroshima attack has softened some over the years, but not so with Nagasaki. It was unnnecesary and wrong. Period. And upon further reflection, the haste with which the [...]

T-shirt for George W. Bush
I almost bought this t-shirt in Japan to send to “President” Bush.